Lesbian Pulp Fiction. Katherine V. Forrest
There’s no better case in point than the novel titled Twilight Girl by Della Martin, published in 1961, apparently the only book by this writer—or perhaps the only one she wrote under this name. It’s the story of an innocent teenage butch named Lorraine (Lon) Harris who discovers the shadowy world where she belongs, journeys to self-discovery within that world, but lacks the inner strength to withstand condemnation by the larger society that has all the power over her life and will not allow her to be any part of the person she is. Twilight Girl (to be reissued by Cleis Press) is a fine and remarkably well-written novel, psychologically true and deeply affecting and timeless, one of my major finds. The somewhat awkwardly phrased blurb on the front cover appears in surprising agreement with my assessment: “We sincerely believe this the finest novel ever to treat of the third sex.” Then there is the back jacket copy: “…For unless the blight [lesbianism] is understood, it cannot be curbed…this book should be read by everyone bent on combating the lesbian contagion.”
An inverse law seems to be at work on pulp fiction novels: the better and more honest the book, the more its jacket copy must moralize against it. For lesbian readers, mixed messages indeed. There is real, honest, and painful truth in Twilight Girl, and it raises important questions about the nature of what it is to be lesbian. Its author without doubt knew whereof she was writing. The viciousness of the jacket copy is designed not only to hold off censors but to short circuit any insights by lesbian readers who might add up the truths in this book and begin to question the inimical judgments made of them.
For this reason the original jacket copy on each of the novels precedes each of the excerpts. Judge for yourself the tenor of the times and the differences between packaging and content, how the copywriters wrote for the censors while the writers wrote about lesbian lives as honestly as they could.
Some of the settings reflect the real world of lesbian society. The pervasive presence of the lesbian bar in Twilight Girl and a number of other novels (Ann Bannon, Paula Christian, Valerie Taylor, Joan Ellis, et al) illustrates how crucial the bar society was for gays and lesbians as our only vestige of visible community and support. Alcohol infused this fiction as it did real life. However destructively addictive, it was the necessary ingredient for breaking down inhibitions and fueling courage, and as medication for the chronic pain of being an outcast.
If a lesbian bar setting is the leitmotif of much early lesbian fiction, other lesbian novels tend to be set everywhere else that young women congregate. Spring Fire takes place on a college campus in the Midwest, in a sorority. Bannon’s Odd Girl Out has virtually the same setting. Some titles are self-explanatory: Torres’s Women’s Barracks, and Summer Camp by Anne Herbert. Novels set within the general confines of heterosexual society show a pattern of being those with the most tragic outcomes: The Whispered Sex (1960) by Kay Martin, has a nightclub setting; My Sister, My Love (1963) by Miriam Gardner (Marion Zimmer Bradley), involves the world of music; Three Women (1958) by March Hastings, is set in the art world. Shirley Verel’s exceptional novel The Dark Side of Venus (1962) features novelist Diana Quendon and Mrs. Judith Allard in the upper-class environs of London.
The success of Ann Bannon’s novels is rooted in their urban setting. Rather than an invented setting, they take place in an actual society and community where isolated lesbians of the day longed to be.
So, what kind of excerpts are here, and why did I choose them? Women’s Barracks and Spring Fire were obvious choices because of their pioneering status. Imagine, as you read these two pieces, their impact on readers as the button-down 1950s began. A number of others are included for their sexual content. Lesbian sex is vibrant during any era (somehow we manage), and you’ll see how these writers portrayed our love with smoldering candor during an era of unrelenting repression. In other excerpts you’ll find some of those happy endings I’ve mentioned. A few, like Fay Adams’s Appointment in Paris, demonstrate the variety of background. I chose others for their palpable reflection of what the times were like, what being a lesbian was like. Quality of the writing is another reason why Brigid Brophy’s The King of a Rainy County and Shirley Verel’s The Dark Side of Venus are here. Writers Ann Bannon, Paula Christian and Valerie Taylor are showcased with more than one excerpt because they have earned an enduring popularity over the decades.
Ann Bannon’s five books in particular are by far the most celebrated of our early literature, and she is called “The Queen of Pulp Fiction” for good reason. The author and her books are in a class by themselves. When her five novels were reprinted in Naiad Press editions in 1983, lesbian readers found that she had all this time been in academia (she retired as assistant dean at Sacramento State College), and she herself received the gratitude, acclaim, and embrace of her community. While the Naiad Press reprints in 1983 were instrumental in her rediscovery by readers who first encountered her in pulp format, the recent Cleis Press reissues have revealed her not only to an entirely new generation of readers learning of this history for the first time, but to the media. She has once again found a huge fan base of lesbian, gay, and queer readers, this time looking to her as living history. She has been featured in film documentaries, radio and television interviews, and in many appearances across the country where she speaks in detail about her novels and their times.
Although several of Paula Christian and Valerie Taylor’s stories follow a lesbian character (Val McGregor and Erika Frohmann, respectively), the Bannon novels form a one-of-a-kind saga featuring three characters. They begin with Laura and Beth in Odd Girl Out, and continue in I Am a Woman with Laura and her volatile relationship with quintessential butch Beebo Brinker in Greenwich Village. The dark-edged (in more than title) Women in the Shadows resumes their story. In Journey to a Woman, Beth seeks out Laura in New York, resulting in an explosive mix of all three characters. Beebo Brinker is the final book, a prequel to the four books, delineating the origins of the title character, arguably still the most iconic figure in all of lesbian fiction.
The five books, vividly written and textured with characterization and setting, charged with passion and color, are especially treasured because they portray the only community most of us knew we had back then, the almost mythic Greenwich Village. The Beebo Brinker series without question will remain a part of our permanent literature.
The importance of all our pulp fiction novels cannot possibly be overstated. Whatever their negative images or messages, they told us we were not alone. Because they told us about each other, they led us to look for and find each other, they led us to the end of the isolation that had divided and conquered us. And once we found each other, once we began to question the judgments made of us, our civil rights movement was born.
The courage of the authors of these books also cannot be overstated, pseudonyms be damned. Anyone who has ever written a book can testify to the feeling of personal risk we experience, the sense of stark exposure. The writers of these books laid bare an intimate, hidden part of themselves and they did it under siege, in the dark depths of a more than metaphorical wartime, because there was desperate urgency inside them to reach out, to put words on the page for women like themselves to read. Their words reached us, they touched us in different and deeply personal ways, and they helped us all.
In my case, and with specific reference to Ann Bannon, they saved my life.
Katherine V. Forrest
San Francisco
March 2005
by Tereska Torres
The frank autobiography of a French girl soldier
This is the story of what happens when scores of young girls live intimately together in a French military barracks. Their problems, their temptations, their fights and failures are those faced by all women who are forced to live together without normal emotional outlets.
The girls who chose Tereska Torres, the author,